As the pregnant woman's contractions rolled in every two minutes, staff at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, dispatched an ambulance to send her elsewhere. Just two minutes later, she gave birth to a 6-pound baby girl in the cab of the ambulance down the road from the 900-bed hospital. The incident, government investigators concluded last year, was a violation of a federal law that requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients in medical distress before discharging or transferring them. Yet, Our Lady of the Lake has never been penalized for that incident. Few ERs ever are, reports the AP.
Just a dozen hospitals have been fined for refusing to treat patients—pregnant or not—over the past two years, an AP analysis of civil monetary penalties issued by the US Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General found. Not one of the more than 100 emergency rooms that mistreated or turned away pregnant women since 2022, when the Biden administration pledged to toughen enforcement of the law, has been fined. After the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to an abortion, the Biden administration turned to a long-standing federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, in an effort to ensure abortion access for women in dire medical circumstances.
The White House has argued that to comply with the law, hospitals must provide emergency abortions for pregnant women who need them to save their lives or reproductive organs, despite state abortion bans. HHS has sent letters to hospitals repeatedly reminding them of the law and its penalties for flouting it—up to $129,232 per violation or loss of Medicare funding. However, HHS does not demand fines from hospitals that violate the law except in unusual cases where they refuse to improve their practices, agency officials said. For the record, ERs were supposed to stop turning away patients in medical crisis decades ago, when Congress passed bipartisan legislation meant to prohibit patient dumping that then-GOP President Ronald Reagan signed in 1986. More here.
(More
pregnant women stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
